I was lucky enough to do a reading recently at Dozen Street in Austin, Texas, hosted by Chicon Street Poets. Before the reading, I sat down for a video interview with Joe Brundidge, who asked me about my common themes, writing practices, and much more. Click her to watch the interview, and thank you for your interest!

I am lucky enough to have three poems included in issue 2.3 of The Grief Diaries, a magazine of art and writing about loss. You can click here to read my poems and here to go to their home page. I suggest following this wonderful organization on Facebook or Twitter (@thegriefdiaries), where they share various articles and essays relating to grief.

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When I think of Natalia Treviño’s work, her poem “Tortilla Skins” comes to mind. It was the first poem of hers that I read, and I was spellbound by the poem’s gradually widening scope, its physicality and texture, and its focus on the lives of women.

Natalia was born in Mexico City and raised in San Antonio, Texas. Her first poetry collection, Lavando La Dirty Laundry, was published by Mongrel Empire Press in 2014. She recently finished a novel, titled Drinking The Bee Water, about an immigrant mother working as a servant in the U.S while separated from her daughter. She is now working on her second poetry collection, Alas de la Agua, poems for and about the Virgin and her many identities. Natalia’s fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have been published in various journals and anthologies, including The Platte Valley Review, Borderlands Texas Poetry Review, Sugar House Review, and burntdistric. She has also been awarded the 2004 Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Foundation Award, the 2008 Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize, and the 2012 Literary Award from the Artist Foundation of San Antonio.

Since you write poetry and fiction, can you describe your relationship to both of these genres?

I am in love with writing fiction, but sometimes I convince myself that fiction does not love me back! Maybe it is a semi-requited love with fiction,whereas poetry is my mother who loves me unconditionally –always there when I need to center myself, not riddled with unapproachable expectations, there to heal and nourish me, to help me look at this world through a new and daring lens. I am not saying my poetry is better at all or that it is easy because few mothers are really easy on their children. But poetry allows for more flexibility with form, room for mistakes, amazing rewards from experimentation, allowing me to edit and make profound and important curves in thought, magical possibilities and changes I can swallow. I want my fiction to do that also but each sitting with fiction takes weeks if not months! My first novel will be coming out next year, and it has been a battle with every major aspect of it except the creation of new scenes when my characters were talking and doing with me out of the way–every change I made went on for pages and had to be cross-checked again and again. Even with all that eye and care, it has mistakes and oversights because it does house so many nooks and crannies! I made point of view shifts multiple times, structural shifts, going from cyclical to linear and back again and then back again, scenes in the past and present, scenes that were only scenes and not “real chapters” — whatever those are! This book wrote itself in many versions with me at the wheel trying to let it grow organically. I had to keep trying and keep trusting that this love of my life would sing along with what I had in my heart! And as when a fickle lover finally stays the night, I am finally so happy with the result, I think, but emotionally exhausted.

Do you have thematic or stylistic “obsessions” that work their way into your writing, no matter the genre?

I am on a path to learn what those are myself! On the surface, I think they are motherhood and love, the two things that shaped my most important and life-changing decisions, the decisions that so many women face, and, due to nature or nurture, often allow to dominate their subconscious decisions and their conscious lives.

Sorting out what those obsessions mean to Mexican women has really been my calling too because I am so influenced by them, good or bad. This group of women are often the ones who silence themselves or are silenced by a number of constrictions or antagonists! I know this is a reaction to my culture and to being bi-cultural in the U.S., and annoyed at the binary platitudes people in my culture often accept.

Below the surface, my obsessions are about the incredible teacher that is nature and her daughters, physics and chemistry as they apply to understanding the human nature and human dynamics as apex models of the human condition and the human limits we strive against every day. How do my electrons, for example, react to this stimuli and why? What receptor was there that allowed this tear to fall, or that fear to balance out? What is at the nucleus of this balm of answer, or of this soothing religion? Or of this enormous power over my appetite? Or of these barbaric politics? There is always an unseen world of actions and motives and reactions at work, and nature is a microcosm of humanity. For instance, a seed has the ambition, vision, imagination, and drive to become a tree. It is chemical, and so am I. I want to stream that reality into my both my poetry and fiction.

What challenges did you encounter while writing your book of poems, Lavando La Dirty Laundry, and how did those challenges differ from your experience with your novel?

Each poem had many iterations –that is true. And each chaplet or chapter in my novel has too. I am attracted to the truth in each genre, and to the voices I want to hone and honor, but most of my poems can be revised in thirty minutes, and I may need to do that three hundred times, totaling 150 hours. Is that math right? Or more! But 150 hours spent on a novel is very different. After one or two hours revising poems, I am either hurting the poems or myself. There is such an intensity of language that it is exhausting, but short. What I am saying is that a poem can take a great leap in in one relatively short sitting, like while a pasta sauce is simmering. While it may take many many of those short sittings for it to become its full self, or to “get there,” as my mentor and dear friend Wendy Barker would always say, the novel is another beast.

The novel chapters take much longer periods of concentration, maybe five hours at a time concentrating on one section, and so who has four or five hour stretches of time? As a working mom and wife, I struggle to get the ample space of time to really concentrate on a scene or chapter without creating discordant idiosyncrasies in other chapters. It is sometimes the “hat problem” that Sandra Cisneros taught us in workshop: If you mention the hat in chapter ten, you better make sure you put that hat on your character earlier! In a poem, a metaphor is earned by its own volition and beauty, in context of course, and enriched by a motif that sets it up, perhaps. There are no strict rules about this. In a novel, every literary leap must be earned in terms of purpose and my biggest weakness, plot. The plot of a poem can be evoked with an image. The plot in a novel needs to be clearly structured in, so that I can give my reader an easy ride through time and space. This is hard for me. Ultimately, a wonderful moment of possibility or insight in the novel, which would be essential to the poem, can become non-essential to the novel and possibly cut, quite easily by an effective editor with a sharp knife because it could be considered a digression from the story to the modern, time-challenged, multi-tasking, and plot-thirsty reader! So organization, time, and structure are very different challenges for a novelist-poet, or for this poet-aspiring-novelist.

I know that there is a strong and vibrant writing community in San Antonio; can you speak to how this community helped you develop as a writer and how they support you now?

I could not be the writer I am without the supportive writers in the San Antonio area. I have to begin with my mentor and dear friend, Wendy Barker, my first poetry professor, and my go-to and trusted poetry mentor today. More importantly, she is a great and close friend. Her enormous capacity for precise language, for delving into inner truths through outer language, for balancing craft and content, for pushing meaning, metrics, and sound with equal fervor has always ruptured my senses, opened my ear, crushed the essence out of my lazy, inflated language, so that my poems reach for clarity, symmetry, and beauty. Wendy is such a love and was such a popular professor back when I was at UTSA that there would be a line of students outside her door. Who did not want the amazing listening she provided and who did not become saved by her deep compassion. She literally restores any pessimist’s hope and faith in humanity because she is so centered and so wise, not to mention funny, badass, and brilliant. I call her my poetry mother. I will always consider her my poetry mother. She and another wonderful poet and professor, Norma Cantu, introduced my work to Sandra Cisneros by nominating me for the Alfredo Cisneros de Moral award.

That award allowed me to meet Sandra, which opened the door to me joining an amazing writing community in San Antonio, Macondo, which she created at her kitchen table over twenty years ago. Macondo is a homeland for writers who meet once a year here, who want to write for non-violent social change, and who have formed a collective made of an astonishing array of sensitive and generous professional writers from all over the country. This included Sandra’s friends like Luis Rodriguez, the poet, Ai, Richard Blanco, Helena Maria Viramontes, Dorothy Allison, Joy Harjo, and many many others. I was able to meet and work with the poets I studied and taught in my classes. What a phenomenal time that was, and while Sandra is no longer the lead, the group is emerging again under the auspices of The Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center, which has a long history of supporting the literary arts and has made a commitment to keep it going. Macondo also allowed me to meet and work with national treasures like John Phillip Santos, Carmen Tafolla, and Norma Cantu, who each, in their own way, have given me encouragement beyond my wildest dreams.

Apart from getting to know those super famoso writers, I met other prolific and kind writers at Macondo too, who work for social change, who embody integrity, and who live all over the country, and many of us are, as Sandra told me we would be, like a family. They opened up my horizons to see what was possible with a career as an academic and a writer. We tell each other the truth, pay attention to the whole person, not just the writer, and help each other when needed across the years and across miles. It is a love I cannot explain. We keep each other accountable, and we all understand the power of compassion and courage in writing because of our experiences at Macondo. I would not have gone to get my MFA had I not been working on my novel with my Macondo friends for years. With them, I had the chance to test the waters. In my MFA program at the University of Nebraska, I was able to dive in deep.

Now that my first book of poetry is out, I take part in more local literary events here in San Antonio, and I have met more of the local community members who have been active in the literary circles for many years. While I was a stay-at-home mommy and then a working mom, I was home a lot, either grading papers or taking my son to his extra-curricular activities. Now that he is older, I have a lot more flexibility to participate in local literary events and culture. I am in a poetry group that meets monthly, and included in this group are writers who are so accomplished, it is almost paralyzing, but I feel so loved and welcomed by them that I pretend I am not an imposter, take my infant poetry squiggles to them, and come away with great inspiration and ideas for improvement. Our group varies from month to month, but includes regulars such as Jim LaVilla-Havelin, Bryce Milligan, Glover Davis, Mariana Aitches, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Roberto Bonazzi, and their wisdom in letters are so far beyond mine that I feel like a child at the ripe age of 46. That is a good feeling to have at my age, and so is the joy, insight, and awakening that happens to me every time we meet.

Another fantastic literary community in San Antonio that has really impacted me is Gemini Ink, an incredible organization for the letters here in San Antonio. Gemini Ink is a local treasure that has allowed me to work with Yusef Kumunyakaa, Tim O’Brien, Reyna Grande (twice!), and others. Gemini Ink offers a fabulous reading series, classes for all levels of writers, and friendship and community for me. Sheila Black and her predecessor, Rosemary Catcalos, two amazing poets, have led this organization so beautifully, offering me jobs in community centers and schools to do the sacred work of bringing literacy and creative writing to some of the most deserving and underserved people I have ever met. Our town is brimming with comunidad, letters, arts, and culture, and we have the writers who put their sleeves up and are willing to share the power of language with all. They inspire me and keep me wanting to improve.

Similarly, what presses, journals, and organizations have made the biggest difference in your life and career?

Arte Publico press has made the biggest difference in my life and career. They introduced me to my whole voice by publishing Pat Mora’s book, Chants, the first book of poetry I read that allowed my bilingual mind to have a presence in my poems. I was 19 when I read this book and fell in love. I will never and can never go back to being a single-language and single-culture poet. Before I read Mora, I did not even hear half of my brain, nor did I let it come to the page. This made a drastic shift in the authenticity of my voice. Recently, that same press accepted my first novel. When this happened, it was like the heavens opened up. It felt like fate, and it also felt like coming home to receive that acceptance. I am thrilled beyond belief that this press sees me as worthy. I have a spiritual and cultural tie to this press. Other presses that I adore are Bordersenses, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Sliver of Stone, all of whom published me at a very vulnerable time in my life. I put the pen down for almost a decade while my soul was dying. They sort of told me not to quit. Burntdistrict a journal run by two of my best friends from Nebraska, has a great piece of my heart. This journal and their press, Spark Wheel Press, do fine work and keep discovering the next big Tupelo poets. I am so proud of them!

What writers do you think have influenced you the most, either in their writing or in their lives?

Wendy Barker, Pat Mora, Sandra Cisneros, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Luis Alberto Urrea, William Carlos Williams, H.D. (big time), and Mark Doty, Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, Naomi Shihab Nye. I have not met each of these lighthouses in the dark, but I know their work deeply, and I feel like my soul is interlinked with theirs, like we are comadres, friends, confidants. Sometimes I will talk to one of them while I am driving in my car, hoping they would understand. That is what literature does–it keeps you from feeling alone in the abyss. Humans would be lost without literature. I am sure I am not alone when I put William Carlos Williams as part of this answer. Anyone who can write while living the harried life of a doctor should inspire us all. There is time to write if we grab a pen instead of our smartphone, cigarette, or remote control.

You’ve worked in different fields in and out of academia. Did some professions inspire you or influence your writing more than others?

Teaching English is all I have ever really done, and while this is a broad profession, from teaching metonymy and critical theory to teaching that their, they’re and there are three different words, I am most influenced by my students. Their innocence, their personal, lived stories, their fragility keep me humble and keep my feet on the ground. I know what is real and what is important. I am a small part of their miraculous lives. I work for them no matter what I do. I want them to know they are not alone and that they can make their wishes come true, and so I am constantly burning the midnight oil in order to become the writer I have always wanted to be for them to see that a person like them can do it, and so can they.

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve received or read?

“Sacrifice the words for the work.” Wendy Barker. This is easy to understand and keeps me from attaching myself to the words, no matter how pretty they may seem. The work is more important, and so the words need to serve that.

Sheila Squillante’s first full-length collection of poetry, Beautiful Nerve, was published by Tiny Hardcore Press in 2015. She is also the author of three chapbooks and the coauthor of a craft book, Writing the Personal: Getting Your Stories Onto the Page, with Sandra L. Faulkner. Her poetry and essays have been published in Brevity, The Rumpus, Prairie Schooner, Quarterly West, and many others.

I first read Sheila Squillante’s work in Sweet: A Literary Confection, during the “My Tribe” workshop that inspired this interview series. When our leader, Jennifer Richter, asked us to bring one or two poems from a poet in our tribe (emerging women writers) to our next class, I chose to bring the poems I’d recently found by Sheila Squillante to share and discuss (hear one of them below). I was particularly drawn to her rhythm and the way the images create motion. I still connect strongly to these and other poems by Sheila, and I’m so glad to have had the opportunity to do this interview.

What were some of your struggles with Beautiful Nerve and how did you overcome those issues?

My biggest struggle was with finding a publisher for the manuscript, which I had been actively sending around in one form or another for close to a decade. Before anyone panics (ten years!?), what I mean is that I had what I thought was my “first book” when I graduated with my MFA in 2002, and like many new graduates, spit-shined and immediately began sending it out. So confident! So hopeful! A handful of the poems in Beautiful Nerve—fewer than ten, I think—were part of that original manuscript, which after several years of submitting to the contest circuit, ultimately became two separate chapbooks that each took a few years to land as well. While that process was happening, I was still writing the poems that would become the whole of Beautiful Nerve (which went through three or four other not very good titles) and writing checks for contest fees and open reading periods. Check after check after check. In one three-year period, it was rejected by 35 separate presses, and honestly, that’s not even that much. Many poets I know hit that many each year. I felt an enormous amount of frustration and a fair bit of skepticism about the process and was seriously considering retiring the manuscript and taking a step back from publishing for a while. It was at that point that a poet-friend of mine, without my knowing about it, contacted an editor we both knew at a small press and said, “Hey, how about you take a look at Sheila’s manuscript? It’s good.”

So after all that time, effort and money, a personal connection is what finally got it in front of the right editor, ten years after I graduated. I tell this story realizing that one word to describe this could be “cronyism,” (I knew someone who knew someone) but the other—the one I vastly prefer and stand by—could be “community.” This sort of thing does not happen unless you are intentionally, actively building relationships and creating good will. During those years of submitting, I spent a lot of time doing just that. I went to AWP and smaller regional conferences. I met people and bought their books. I reviewed books and I shared work I loved—mine and theirs—on social media.

None of this ever felt like work to me. It’s not like I was thinking, “I have to do this because I want my book to be published.” If it had ever started to feel slimy or born of self-interest, I hope I would have stepped back to reflect and reexamine my motivations.

It seems like poets, in particular, need to be really proactive in promoting their books, especially first books. Can you tell me about some of the outreach you’ve participated in since the release of Beautiful Nerve and how you think you benefited from these activities?

Tiny Hardcore is what you’d call a “micro-press.” There can be wonderful perks to taking this path that might include more authorial control, closer contact with attentive editors and publishers, and in some cases, more interesting (to me) aesthetic possibilities. (Look at my cover, for instance. Amazing, right? That’sAlban Fisher, who does stunning work for the small press community. Let’s give him all our money.)

The downside is that small presses often don’t have any marketing budget, nor do they have dedicated staff to help authors get exposure for their work. The work they do is truly a labor of love and gritty resolve. Some things I did to help BN along include asking for a pdf copy of the book so I could seek reviewers myself, posting about it on my website (I could be doing more there), doing interviews and sharing (but not over-sharing!) updates about the book and my work on social media. I sent one big e-mail blast to pretty much everyone I knew when the book was finally available. I made up postcards with the cover image on one side and a sample poem and ordering info on the other to take to readings and leave in bookstores before my author copies arrived. I felt that was a worthwhile expense. I did an author signing with the book at AWP.

It also helped, I think, that I am basically a mid-career writer at this point. I’ve been doing this for a long time. I have a big network that grew up organically over many years of publishing in journals, teaching and doing all the above community-building stuff.

Put another way, there are benefits to being old. 😉

Still, I expect the process would have been better and easier if I felt I had more support and direction from the very busy folks on the press side. (Though it should be said that I know writers whose books came out with major publishing houses or university presses who had the same experience of being required to shoulder marketing efforts and floundering around a bit. It’s just where we are in publishing right now.) They did send out a few blurb requests, and that brought me a nice endorsement from a poet I admire. I probably should have pursued more on my own but this stuff takes a kind of endurance I don’t always have.

I’m actually about to get another go at PR stuff because Tiny Hardcore (which was affiliated with PANK magazine), is going through a transition. My book and the rest of the catalog are being taken on by another press in 2016. Unfortunately, until then Beautiful Nerve is unavailable, but I’m trying to remind people it’s still out there by doing interviews (like this!) and readings and such in the interim.

Does working at Chatham University and on The Fourth River feed or influence your writing?

Absolutely. As part of my teaching contract, I am now expected to write and publish. A paycheck is a very motivating thing!

No, the real answer is that working with people (faculty and students alike) who care about writing as much as I do is wonderfully affirming and motivating. They keep me grounded and active in my craft. Last year, for instance, my colleague and I sat at my dining room table on a Sunday afternoon putting together our NEA applications. Misery loves company.

Editing The Fourth River reminds me that the publishing world is dynamic and thriving in many ways. It’s pretty exhilarating, if also daunting, to see all that work waiting in our Submittable queue at the start of each semester. I love being in the position to show MFA students around that world. I want them to form healthy habits and attitudes around writing and publishing which means I am always trying to model that for them. I hope I do.

I’ve also become much more familiar with nature writing as a genre (we are a journal of nature and place-based writing), and with the many excellent writers whose work we are fortunate to publish. Those influences are certainly working their way into my thoughts as well as my writing.

What sort of writing support system do you have? For example, are you part of a writing group?

I do most of my writing alone, now. It’s nice to be at a place in my career where I mostly trust my own instincts. I do have a couple of close friends—not all of them writers—who will read drafts for me if I ask them to. My husband is especially helpful with this. So my biggest support comes from people I get to see once or twice a year at conferences. These are the same people I see and read every day on Facebook, where I spend too much time despite how positive and nurturing it has been for my writing self. (True!)

I do want to shout out one group who I certainly think of as a support system:Barrelhouse Magazine. I’ve been kind of a hanger-on with them for several years through theConversations and Connections conference they run, but as of January 1, I am officially joining the team as blog editor. I’m excited. They are fun and weird and smart and really, really terrific writers. Nicest people in publishing.

Your job sounds amazing! Can you tell me a little about how you came to be a leader at an MFA program, teacher, and editor-in-chief at a nationally respected journal?

My job is indeed amazing, thank you! How I got it was by being stubborn and persistent for many years, and then, by being on Facebook too much.

After I graduated with my MFA, I stayed on to teach as an adjunct at my university for what I thought was going to be a year or two at most. Two things happened that extended my stay: I was offered the position of associate director of that program, and I met my husband who was in the middle of his PhD. So I learned a lot about arts administration while continuing to hone my teaching and my writing. I kept sending work out to journals and the manuscripts out to contests. I also started applying for tenure-track positions. This is the stubborn part, because the truth was that I really wasn’t qualified to do so without a published book, and maybe especially, without a PhD of my own. The professor for whom I began working as associate director had said plainly to me that those skills would give me a huge advantage on the job market later. I believed her, so I kept applying, PhD be damned.

I didn’t apply every year—I became a mother twice in that time, too—but of the many, many jobs I did apply for, I got exactly one phone interview and one Skype interview, both from universities who were looking to hire someone with teaching and administrative skills.

I don’t say this to be discouraging, but to illustrate just how competitive that job market is and to encourage anyone pursuing an MFA to seek out opportunities beyond teaching that can add to their repertoire and make them more appealing as a candidate. That could be administration or publishing. Grant writers are in big demand, too. And maybe think about getting that PhD after all. This is one of the things I really love about Chatham’s program, actually. We offer students the ability to earn a concentration—basically like a minor—in addition to their MFA. We have concentrations in nature writing, travel writing, food writing, publishing and pedagogy. We want to give our students any possible advantage to help them have a sustainable, fulfilling life after graduation.

There are so many excellent teachers and writers who definitely deserve to be teaching in MFA programs. I hope they keep applying, but I’ll be honest: I was very close to giving up the hope that I’d ever get there. It’s an exhausting process and as I said, I had two small children and a steady adjunct teaching job that afforded all of us benefits if not a huge income. We had lived in our town for fourteen years. I was also over forty years old. I was tired. I told myself I would only apply to jobs if the application felt easy to do. I couldn’t bear expending any more energy.

Then, one day I read an essay which appeared along with one of mine in an online journal and was very moved by it. I went looking for the writer on Facebook, sent her a message to tell her how much I had enjoyed it, and we became friends there. It was literally the next week, I think, that she posted about a job opening at her university. I saw it and thought, “I could do that.” So I applied at the eleventh hour. And I’m so glad that I did! Chatham is a great place. I love my colleagues and adore my students. And the fact that they trusted me to take on The Fourth River in my first semester was the cherry on top. Of course, that wasn’t a completely blind decision as I had been involved with the publishing world in various respects for several years, but it was still a risk for them and I’m grateful they took it. With the launch of our last (truly spectacular) online issue,Queering Nature, I’m pretty sure they’d say it paid off.

What are you working on now?

I am about two thirds of the way into a new book of poems about a character who I’m telling people is “mostly human, most of the time.” I call her Round Baby and though we share some experiences and characteristics, she is decidedly not me. This is the first time I’ve ever written fiction of any kind and I have to say it’s been pretty fun and surprising. The poems follow her from birth up to about age fifteen. She’s my age so that means she gets to spend adolescence sporting unfortunate big hair and listening to Def Leppard on her Walkman. I think she’s awesome.

During the last year of my MFA program, the poetry cohort was made entirely of women. For our final workshop, our leader for the term, Jennifer Richter, gave our course the theme “Our Tribe.” We read only first collections by women, including To See the Queen by Allison Seay, Love, an Index by Rebecca Lindenberg, and Fair Copy by Rebecca Hazelton. I loved supporting these women in early stages of their careers by buying their books and discussing all of the exciting things they were doing in the poems.

Now that I’ve finished my degree at Oregon State, and I’m living and working in a new community, I’ve decided to continue to build my “tribe” by interviewing emerging women writers.

My first interview in the “My Tribe” series is with the poet Emily Bludworth de Barrios, whose first full-length collection, Splendor, was published this year by H_NGM_N Books. She is also the author of a chapbook, Extraordinary Power (Factory Hollow Press).

When I started reading Splendor, I was captivated by how the poems circled around bits of personal truth, trying to define the abstract. This goal feels at the heart of Bludworth de Barrios’s collection, in which the narrator attempts, again and again, to explain–with precisely tailored diction–and therefore understand, her past and present, her actions and thoughts, the events out of her control, and what these things reflect on her values and identity.

In the Interview, Bludworth de Barrios explains her process in ordering the poems in Splendor, her struggles in the collection, her writing support systems, what she is working on now, and more.

I love that the poem titles are drawn from Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto. Can you tell me about the role these quotes played in the crafting of the poems? Why did you choose to use that book?

Writing in conjunction with lines from Horace Walpole’s text gave me permission to write in a voice and shape that felt more in line with the contours of my thoughts. I’m not sure why.

What was the process of ordering the poems like?

I first sketched out the order of the poems with Dara Wier, my mentor and friend at UMass, who is really so nurturing of writers and writing, a kind person, generous reader, and rare thinker. We laid the poems out on her dining room table—a long farmer’s table, in a room lined with bright windows. There we looked at how poems spoke to each other (the poem preceding, the poem following), and the larger story the poems told together. It was useful to see the poems laid out across space in that way, and I used that technique again, later, on my own.

I knew that I wanted to open the book with the poem that opens it. It was the first poem I wrote for the book, and it announces the way language is used throughout the book, and its concerns—flaws, disappointments, abstract nouns: “Your failure feels treacherous inside you.” The latter poems offer various ways out of the bleakness of imperfections and uncertainty: narrative (“I am wanting to make death more like a story”), gorgeousness (“Imagining a funereal bier burning on water at night Glaze of light on water It is an orange and glossy celebration”), self-awareness (“You must needs arrange your priorities”), and love (“Get your skin-to-skin contact while you’re able”).

What were some of your struggles with the collection? How did you maneuver these issues?

Once I had written into the voice and concerns of the book, its particular set of quirks and tendencies, I wanted to write my way out of them. After a time I felt like my writing was too familiar and predictable, some poems too similar to other poems. It was helpful to use the titles from The Castle of Otranto as a unifying element to the book—so that I could vary the range of my poems, but, with the consistent titles, I felt like I was still within the same realm. It was also helpful to allow time to lapse between poems.

Once I was talking to my dear friend Lina Mounzer about self-doubt in writing. She talked about the shame we feel about our literary voices—maybe that we’re not intelligent enough, funny enough, large enough, or whatever. But that the voices we have, at the end of the day, are the only voices we have to tell our stories. So what else is there to do except forge on?

I will say—for whatever use it may be to anyone—that I wrote another book prior to this book, a book which I threw out. That book was a genuine “collection” of poems I’d written over a number of years. It wasn’t conceived of as a book; it was gathered up, cobbled together. It contained many poems I like, and liked writing. But throwing it away was liberating and allowed me to begin in a new place. I don’t even remember what prompted me to do so, now, if anything prompted me at all. I only remember thinking, “I’m throwing this out,” and I did.

What sort of support system did you have while writing the book? Were you in workshops or a writing group?

There is a small circle of people—friends, and my husband—who typically look at my writing. None are poets. Each of these are really kind and generous people who ask good questions (it’s always kind and generous to look at someone’s writing, giving attention, which takes time and focus).

I wrote maybe 40 of the poems from Splendor in my final semester of my MFA program at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. I wrote the remaining 20 or so poems in Houston, while working full-time, over the course of a year.

That semester when I wrote the bulk of the book, the conditions were important: I was living alone, long-distance from my husband. I had a lot of free time—taking a few classes, teaching one or two classes. Having uninterrupted time to think was an important luxury. It was necessary in the creation of the book.

In addition to having time to write and ruminate, at UMass I was continually motivated by and surprised by my classmates and teachers—by what they were writing, and by the writers they recommended. I was part of an incredibly strong cohort of poets—Emily Hunt, Hannah Brooks-Motl, Wendy Xu, JoAnna Novak, Sadie Dupuis, James Jones, Liana Quill Camper-Barry, and Caroline Crew, among others. I was inspired by the writing and passion of my teachers Dara Wier, James Tate, Peter Gizzi, Noy Holland, and Jedediah Berry, as well as by previous graduates of the program like Rachel B. Glaser, Heather Christle, and Dorothea Lasky. At the non-profit literary organization Flying Object, I worked with poets and artists like Michael Earl Craig, Emily Pettit, Guy Pettit, Margot Douaihy, Bri Hermanson, and Heather Christle on the creation of chapbooks. In short, I was among a group of people with unique perspectives and vibrant styles, which I absorbed both intentionally and unconsciously.

I think it’s in the unpredictable exposure to new ideas, experiences, and approaches that distinctive writing is produced.

For example, in my final semester at UMass I took a fiction class with Noy Holland in which she asked each of us to consider how writing is like another art form. She specifically wanted to avoid a traditional “arc” of a narrative, to think of alternative ways a piece of writing could be structured, maybe informed by these other art forms. I thought about what visual art and architecture accomplish that words cannot. Thinking of a poem as a physical experience, as a thing to stand inside, as a place to have ideas knock up against you—this was valuable to me. I would not have written a poem like “with a mixture of grace and humility” (first published inUCity Review) if I hadn’t been thinking about poetry in that way, as a piece of architecture:

“with a mixture of grace and humility,”

Let us have a brief period of silence

During which time
you will think about nothing
and you will have the qualities of a silver coin

A period of silence
is a column with a hole at the top and a hole underneath

The second period of silence commences now

Was it difficult to start a new project after finishing Splendor?

For six months or a year—yes! I was wanting to not write in the same voice, or the same style. For a while, I wasn’t sure what that would feel like and sound like. If I wrote something that felt like it could have seamlessly belonged in Splendor, I threw it out. I made invisible rules for myself—poems should not be written in the second person, they should not be very short, they should not define abstract nouns, nor use empty intensifiers. I did not want to write so intensely about interiority. Basically I tried very specifically to trim myself of certain thinking habits that had come to feel very natural.

And—we put our house on the market, purchased a new house that had to be extensively remodeled, and I became pregnant—a lot of things were happening all at once. I didn’t write much during the period from when the book was accepted until it was published.

Splendor was published when my son was only a few months old. In a way, that made writing more difficult—it’s a druggy, surreal, difficult time—and it also made writing exciting and vital, since I had just the barest slivers to squeeze it into. It was easy to be efficient and focused. I was (and am) experiencing things that are intense and new.

Any little bit of time. Privacy is important, I guess. As a woman, wife, teacher, and mother, privacy always feels fiercely important, absolutely selfish. Given natural obligations and demands on my attention, I work with the forms of privacy and time I’m able to extract. (I dream of long, uninterrupted mornings, mornings of books and slanting light and a light breakfast—although I know full well that, given the gift of time in that way, I’d probably find some way to be disappointed in it or otherwise squander it. Or it would, at least, feel less halcyon and more restless than it appears to be from the vantage-point of an obligation-laden life.)

Do you have a favorite literary journal you never miss an issue of?

Too many things are clamoring for my (and everyone’s) attention for me to sit faithfully and fully relish a particular magazine with dependable regularity. But poetry is the one subject—unlike, say, music, art, or comedy—where I will patiently give attention to many things that may not be quite right for me in order to find something transcendent and shockingly good. And what feels transcendent, to me, is of course a matter of taste and mood as much as quality. Here are some of the magazines where I find such writing in higher quantities: Apogee, Prelude, The Divine Magnet, jubilat, Big Lucks, Sixth Finch, The White Review, The American Reader, Tender, The Sink Review, B O D Y, The Buenos Aires Review, and The Offing. I like literary journals that have a strong editorial voice. I love to see how styles flower in various places.

Today I had a short story published in the second issue of Tahoma Literary Review. This was my first fiction publication, and I’m very excited about its release! Anyone interested in reading my story, “Jack and Gustav,” can download the issue for free from the Tahoma Literary Review website. The PDF and Epub versions are available for free, and the Kindle version can be downloaded for $1.